Actually, it was very much like HN is today, or as /r/programming is today. As an ordinary user, I thought that the creation of subreddits was a clever solutio

Actually, it was very much like HN is today, or as /r/programming is today. As an ordinary user, I thought that the creation of subreddits was a clever solution to the Eternal September Problem. The initial pool of users were folks that were sniped away from Slashdot and Digg. There was quite a bit of frustration about the editorship of Slashdot, and having a system that was effectively user-edited was quite attractive. But as the readership grew, a wider array of material started showing up, frequently accompanied by the typical grumbling about relevance. The solution was to split off new user groups into more specialized subgroups. The initial set of subreddits were effectively curated by Reddit itself, based on the categories of stuff that was showing up in practice. User-generated subreddits didn't come until later.